Excitement. Jordan has been waiting for this present. Grandma Bev. Jordan pictures her—an older woman, dyed red hair, heavyset but made of love. Jordan’s hand quivers as she reaches for the package. She takes it. I feel it pressed against her fingers, the weight of it as her mom lets go.
She brings it back toward us slowly. She’s still smiling, but it feels different on the inside. It’s work now.
Jordan is sad. Her feelings sit inside her and me both. I’m sad with her. We miss Grandma Bev, want her here.
Know we can’t say anything. Mom says she loves her mom, but she worries that Grandma is an ungodly influence on us, the girls. Jordan doesn’t bring it up anymore. She’s found other ways to communicate with Grandma Bev—secret ways.
The girls: I have sisters, Samantha and Avery. Jordan’s feelings cloud over, thinking about it. She never used to lie, keep secrets, but her mom and dad . . .
They wouldn’t understand. They’d think she was falling, failing, turning bad.
Girls shouldn’t have secrets, not from their mothers.
Girls shouldn’t have boyfriends, not unless their fathers approve.
Jordan presses a nail underneath the tape of the package in her lap, serrates it. “I wonder what it is . . .” Our voice sounds as strange in our head as the others do outside.
The speaker comm on the table chimes. Jordan’s mom lights up. “That’ll be your dad!”
Jordan pauses, but I want Jordan to keep unwrapping. I can feel how much she wants to have something more of Grandma. I feel Jordan’s frustration, but she says nothing, her fingernail still pinched between the flaps of the box.
She smiles, but it’s not a real one. We think about our lips, our eyes, how high to raise our eyebrows. We’re practiced at this. “Hey, Dad!” we say brightly to the face on the screen.
We lie well.
He smiles back at us; his face is lined. His hair is gray. He insists it’s regal, stentorian, but Jordan knows the truth. He looks old.
He does. I’ve always thought so, too. I know the man on the screen.
He’s the president of the United States.
“Happy birthday, JJ!” he says.
“Thanks, Dad!” Jordan looks down. “I’m opening Gram’s present.”
He nods, looks warily at Mom. “What is it?”
Jordan takes the cue, slipping the box out of the wrap. “A new screen . . .” She has a screen. Grandma knows this. It’s not a better screen, either. It unfolds to the same size, weighs the same. It’s the same brand. “Wow,” she says, opening the box to examine the contents.
New feelings. Disappointment. Something else. Concern. She’s worried about her Grams. She presses the power button, watches as the screen brightens.
Icons appear.
It takes her a moment. I see it before she does, but when she does, she works hard to keep her face neutral.
The icons have labels. The labels have a message. “Press me,” the first one says. “When no one,” the next. “Is watching,” the third. “Especially,” the next icon continues, “your parents.”
Then: “Love Naomi.”
It’s just a name to me, but the Bible story is thick in Jordan. Naomi, the mother-in-law of Ruth, a woman Ruth would follow anywhere, who helped Ruth navigate her way into a new life with her own people, away from the Moabites from which Ruth had come. Jordan first called her Naomi after she snuck a disguised copy of Harry Potter into Jordan’s reader when she was ten, an invitation to break away from her mom and dad’s strict sense of right and wrong.
Grandma Bev calls Jordan Ruth sometimes, especially when she’s forwarding a letter from Will.
The last icon says “Press me now.”
Jordan’s finger hesitates over the icon before she taps it; pressing it commits her to another secret.
Tap.
The icons shuffle and rename themselves. She holds it up to show the family.
“Why do you get two screens when I don’t even have one?” Avery asks.
Jordan doesn’t roll her eyes. Instead: “You can have my other one, okay?”
And then I’m back in myself and I’m looking through my own eyes at Paul. My mind is racing and I can hardly breathe. When I lift up my hand, it’s shaking. I think I might be dying and I look at Paul for help, but he’s laughing at me.
“First witness’s a bitch.”
“What . . .” I have to take a breath and try again before I can even say a sentence. “What the hell was that?”
“Superpowers, man! I told you—you just went into the future in somebody else’s mind!” He’s squatting down to get his head at my level and he leans in. “So?”
“What?” I ask, not sure what he wants.
“How was it?”
I think about what I saw. I can still see the images and I can recall the voices and smells. It’s all way too weird. I shake my head. “The colors . . .”
“What you see is different with every target.” He smacks his lips. “I bet for you, it’s more than just the colors and stuff. For you it’s probably—”
“They’re different . . .”
Richard is sitting in the chair at the desk, watching us. “Sensory perception is different for everybody. My blue is going to be different than yours. We both call it blue because that’s what we were told to call the color we see, but we aren’t seeing it the same way. Electrical impulses from our ears aren’t necessarily interpreted the same way by our minds. We have different numbers and qualities of olfactory and taste sensors, too. Different levels of sensitivity at our nerve endings, so when you’re in somebody else’s mind, every sensation’s going to be different.”
Paul rolls his eyes. “I wouldn’t know from all that. Except for color and sound, for me it’s all fuzzy, like I’m watching underwater.” Paul looks at me. “But you with your ten-lane highway, you probably see so clear you could count fleas on the family dog.”
The experience was so strange to begin with and now, thinking about it afterward, it’s like having a strong memory that couldn’t have ever happened. Like when the little girl pushes through all the coats in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and finds the snowy forest. In my mind, Jordan Castle’s birthday melts and now I’m remembering me watching the Narnia movie with Pete.
“So? Was it clear, like you were actually there?” Paul brings me back to the moment.
Jordan. Being there, in her head, was clear. I think that’s what was so weird about it—I was her and me at the same time. Her eyes were mine. Ears, nose, all of it. “Yeah.” And then: “I was Jordan.”
Richard shakes his head. “Leave names out of it.” But it barely registers.
“I was a girl,” I continue.
I turn to Richard. He looks uncomfortable.
Paul is laughing, though.
I start to say more, but Richard waves me off. “We don’t share what happens on the job with anybody, Alex—if the wrong information spreads, it could cause real complications.”
“She’s been lying to her parents.” I think a little more. “She’s got a boyfriend,” I add helpfully before realizing that I must sound like a total idiot.
“That’s good, buddy.” Paul pats my knee. “It’s all part of being a healthy adolescent.”
Twenty-Three
Paul’s got something to do and points me toward the kitchen for lunch. Corina and Damon are already at a table when I walk in. They’ve got empty plates in front of them and they’re deep in some conversation, but Corina stops talking when she sees me in the doorway.
“Hey, Alex.” She smiles. I think she looks happy to see me. “Got your patch?”
Damon looks up, too. He looks less happy.
I nod, smile a little bit. “Yeah.”
“C’mere.” She waves me over. I cross from the door so I’m standing next to her. “Let�
�s see it.”
“See what?”
“Your patch.” She touches my arm just below my sleeve and tugs at the fabric. “Roll it up.”
I do. She leaves her hand on my arm. I sneak a look over at Damon while she and I fiddle with my sleeve. He’s annoyed.
“It’s so strange.” Corina touches my patch. Her voice is so soft it’s almost a whisper. “Feeling things like they’re happening to skin when something touches the patch.”
I pay attention to her touch. She’s right. Even though I can tell that there’s something different about the feel of her finger based on whether it’s touching me or the patch, I can still feel both. I nod.
Damon stands up and leans over the table. “Let me see.”
He reaches over and pinches my patch, hard.
The pain is awful, like getting kicked in the nuts with a boot. I scream and pull away, but the pain is so intense that I can’t even make my legs work. My eyes start to water and he laughs.
“You and your patch—you’re both pussies.” He walks around to the other side of the table and sheds his jacket onto a chair before walking his plate back to the counter. He doesn’t even look in my direction.
Corina’s saying something to him, but I can’t hear her words. I can’t hear anything. I see red. The adrenaline spikes in my fingers and my feet. My sight narrows.
Everything that’s gone wrong in the world in the last week floods my mind at once.
He’s going to pay.
I’m up and over to him in a flash. Corina calls my name, but I’m not stopping. I can’t see anything but him going down. I move to intercept him but he ignores me so I shove him hard from behind. “You messed up, bitch.” He stumbles into the counter.
He’s got me by six inches in height and he’s thicker than me, too, but I don’t care. He turns toward me like he’s going to say something but I don’t give him the chance. He’s right in my range, so I box him at the temple and he goes down in a pile. I kick him once, hard, to drive the point home. His shirtsleeve pulls up when he falls and his patch is showing. I reach for it, ready to make him hurt worse than he made me, but then there’s new hands on me.
Instinct kicks in and I drop down under the grip of whoever’s got me and send an elbow backward. I land it hard in their stomach and I hear the air go out of them like I popped a balloon.
“Oh shit,” Corina shrieks. “What did you do?” I whip around to see what she means.
It’s Paul. He’s wiggling in pain, his face is red, and it looks like his eyes are about to pop out of his head.
I look back at Damon, but he’s still on the floor.
“Damn,” Corina says, staring at me. She crosses over to Paul and kneels down next to him. Richard runs in, sees us, pulls a radio from somewhere and mumbles into it like a security guard.
I’ve just screwed everything up.
I don’t know what else to do, so I make a break for it, pushing past Richard, through the gym and out onto the patio. Richard calls my name, but I don’t slow down until I’m in the Long Hall, headed for the driveway.
I hear the door on the deck side close behind me and lock. The driveway door is locked, too. I look around, but there’s nowhere else to go.
I slide to the floor.
The walls brighten so I look up. There’s a picture of Corina driving, and another of Julio and Zeon squaring off on the day they met for the first time in sixth grade. It was one of the most entertaining fights I’ve ever seen. Zeon took Julio down.
I’ve got nowhere to go. I close my eyes to dive deep for my Voice. Things are different with the patch—the drain’s not there anymore. It’s like the patch stopped it up. Instead, there’s just the path Paul took me down. I can hear the jackhammer pile of guitars behind the wall but that’s it.
HELLO?
Nothing. Just like she said.
When I resurface, Corina’s coming up the hall toward me.
“Alex? You okay?”
“Yeah.” Then: “You saw. He pinched my patch and called me a pussy,” I tell her before she can even ask. I shake my head. “He shouldn’t have done that.”
She’s standing over me now. I look up at her, but her eyes aren’t on me—they’re on the wall with the picture of her in the car. “That’s how I look to you?”
The heat of embarrassment rises in my face, overwhelming what was left of the adrenaline from the fight. I don’t answer her. Instead I think of anything else besides her so the picture will change.
“South Park?” she asks. I look up again and her picture is gone, replaced by a scene with Kenny from South Park. I realize I’ve been holding my breath. I let it out.
“I like South Park.”
“Me too,” she says. She slides down against the wall across from me. She’s wearing a skirt and it’s hard not to look at where her foot has kicked it up to her upper thigh. She follows my eyes and shifts her position, making me feel even more awkward.
“Sorry,” I mutter, not sure whether I’m sorry for looking at her legs or for thinking about her and making the picture happen or for clocking Damon and knocking Paul down.
She shrugs. “It happens,” she says. “Damon plays too much.”
“Paul doesn’t. He didn’t deserve that.”
She shakes her head. “Nope. You shouldn’t have done that.”
“He should’ve minded his own business.” But even while I’m saying it I know it’s stupid. “Never mind. I didn’t . . .”
“He’s alright. You didn’t do any permanent damage.”
“What about Damon?”
She shrugs. “He’ll live and maybe grow up a little bit.”
Before I can stop myself I think about her and Damon at dinner the night before. They looked cozy and like they were really into each other. I hear her laugh. She’s looking over my head and when I look up, I see the two of them at dinner last night in a big picture on the wall. I want to die and I desperately try and think of anything else.
A picture of Benny, my mom’s old Chihuahua.
“Cute dog,” she says. “You think me and Damon . . . ?” She laughs. “There are rules here, though, and one of the big ones is that we aren’t allowed to ‘develop emotional or romantic attachments’ with other witnesses.”
“So? It’s not like everybody follows the rules.” I’m obviously totally jealous. My face gets all hot again and I feel myself sweating. “Not that I care,” I lie.
“Course you don’t.” She smiles and shifts her weight so that she frees a leg and kicks me with it. Not hard or anything, just like you do. “But just so you know, Damon is most definitely not my type.”
I smile and look down, almost too embarrassed to form words. “Don’t matter.” Then: “How much trouble am I in?”
She shakes her head. “You and Damon are going to have to work things out and you’re going to need to make this up to Paul somehow, but I think that’ll probably be the end of it.”
“Richard isn’t pissed at me?”
She shrugs. “I think he was a little surprised at having his suburban compound life suddenly go street, but he’ll get over it.”
“It’s hard not to . . .” I shrug. “What was I supposed to do?”
“I feel you, but here at the compound, we’re supposed to talk it out.” She rolls her eyes. “Even when people deserve a little pain.”
Twenty-Four
“Let’s talk in my office,” Richard says when he sees Corina walk me back across the pool deck.
I’m scared. However weird this place is, the thought of being kicked out makes me feel even worse. “Okay,” I say.
He smiles gently and gestures toward the gym door with his chin. “It’s the first door on the right on the other side of the basketball court.” He nods agreeably. “I’ll be right there.”
I wait for him to show me, but he d
oesn’t.
He just looks at me encouragingly. “I’ll be right there, kiddo.”
I shrug and walk through the door into the gym. I can feel him and Corina waiting until I’m out of earshot before they start to talk about me.
Richard’s office looks like a cross between a man cave and a school principal’s office. There’s a desk covered with papers and a couple of padded chairs that face it, and the walls are covered with posters—Einstein with his tongue out, Seahawks, Mariners. There’s a blown-up photo of a Locust, too, that keeps drawing my eye. Coldplay, AntiSeems, and an enormous Taylor Swift round out the collection.
Richard seems like a nice enough guy, but I can’t say we see eye to eye musically.
There’s an old-school 2-D TV tucked into a bookshelf and a strange-looking box thing underneath it that I don’t recognize. I’m wondering whether I can get a closer look at it when Richard comes in.
“Hey, man,” he says as he comes through the door. He pats me on the shoulder as he passes me on the way to his desk. “That was quite a thing.”
“Is Paul okay?”
Richard shakes his head as he sits down. “Paul’s fine—you just knocked the wind out of him.”
“I didn’t mean to . . .”
“I bet.” He takes a deep breath. “I’m sure you didn’t.”
This isn’t going the way I want it to. He’s not yelling at me or telling me the ways I’ve screwed up. “Damon started it.”
“Yeah . . .” Richard’s voice is kind, filled with understanding. “I watched the feed. There’s no doubt.”
I can hear the enormous but hanging off the end of his sentence. “But?”
“But in the end you lost your temper, Alex.” He appraises me like a doctor.
I shrug. I don’t want to tell him he’s right.
“If Damon pinching your patch can set you off that much, what are you going to do when the fate of the world is on your shoulders—you’re not going to be useful to anybody, including us.”
My heart stops. He’s going to kick me out. My world goes black. Images of the street, prison, being insane. “Don’t,” I whisper. “I won’t . . .”
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